The Mileage from Social Axioms: Learning from the Past and Looking Forward Chin-Ming Hui and Natalie Heung-Hung Hui Abstract Social axioms are proposed as fundamental psychological constructs tapping a person’s beliefs about the social world and how it works, positioned cen- trally in the nomological network of broad psychological constructs and capable of predicting crucial psychological outcomes. This ambitious proposal has been put to empirical test across psychological domains around the world. In this chapter, we review all published empirical investigations on social axioms, demarcating them from other broad psychological constructs (e.g., personality and values) as well as examining if and how they could serve the four specific functions originally pro- posed, viz., “facilitate the attainment of important goals (instrumental), help people protect their self-worth (ego-defensive), serve as a manifestation of people’s values (value-expressive), and help people understand the world (knowledge)” (Leung et al., 2002, p. 288). We envisage social axioms as fundamental and useful psycho- logical constructs that will continue to gain importance in social sciences research in the decades to come, and we propose a number of fruitful future research directions to promote this line of research. The Mileage from Social Axioms: Learning from the Past and Looking Forward Since the model of social axioms was proposed (Leung & Bond, 2004; Leung et al., 2002), there has been a growing interest in their functions. The present chapter serves as a summary of what has been found so far about their functions, along with some proposed research directions for the future. This chapter consists of three parts: The first demarcates social axioms from other important and closely related psychological constructs, such as values and personality. The second part presents a literature review of the nomological networks and psychological implications of each social axiom. Given that previous research demonstrated that the five-factor C.-M. Hui and N.H.-H. Hui The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China K. Leung and M.H. Bond (eds.), Psychological Aspects of Social Axioms 13 © Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009